What we’re reading (10/20)
“The Day Amazon Broke The Internet For Millions Of Americans” (Wall Street Journal). “The trouble started a few hours after midnight on the East Coast. A minor update to what’s called the Domain Name System—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash. DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services product that has become one of the world’s most important databases. Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.”
“Massive Amazon Cloud Outage Has Been Resolved After Disrupting Internet Use Worldwide” (Associated Press). “Amazon says a massive outage of its cloud computing service has been resolved as of Monday evening, after a problem disrupted internet use around the world, taking down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.”
“White House Economic Advisor Hassett Says Shutdown Could End This Week” (CNBC). “Top White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett on Monday predicted the government shutdown is ‘likely to end sometime this week.’ But if that does not happen, the Trump administration may impose ‘stronger measures’ to force Democrats to cooperate, Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said on CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box.’”
“Cleveland-Cliffs Stock Soars After Company Touts Plans To ‘Re-Focus’ Its Rare Earth Mining Efforts” (Yahoo! Finance). “Cleveland-Cliffs stock rallied as much as 24% Monday, ending the day up over 20% after the company announced it would redouble efforts related to mining for rare earth minerals, which has become one of the hottest commodities trades on Wall Street this year. ‘Beyond steelmaking, the renewed importance of rare earths has driven us to re-focus on this potential opportunity at our upstream mining assets,’ CEO Lourenco Goncalves said in the company's earnings release.”
“Mysterious Spot In Earth’s Magnetic Field Now Growing Rapidly” (Futurism). “A major dip in the Earth’s magnetic field over the South Atlantic has been puzzling scientists for over a century. Perhaps most strangely, the weak spot — dubbed the South Atlantic Anomaly — has grown rapidly over the last eleven years. That’s according to satellite data suggests showing it’s expanded by an area equivalent to half the size of continental Europe, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors. An international team of researchers analyzed data collected by the European Space Agency’s Swarm, a constellation comprised of three identical satellites that measure the Earth’s magnetic signals. The findings could allow us to improve existing magnetic models that play a crucial role in navigation and tracking of space weather, while also furthering our understanding of how the Earth’s layers interact with each other.”
